I Will Not Shot in RAW

Here's one for those that say you cannot PP a jpg for WB, contrast, brightness, tone curve, sharpness, saturation or any other parameter. Anything can be adjusted in jpg PP so long as you stay within the jpg limits.

Here is an example PP from a normal daylight shot:

Well, at least it wasn't a full lit, blue skies ISO 100 shot like every other example trumpeted out to show that JPEG is equal to the task (it's not) But you're showing art, not 'as it is seen' photography, so I have trouble seeing this image as proving much of anything.

The obvious point where WB comes up is indoor lighting photography. Even the SLRs blow at this with AWB, the compacts don't do any better. And no, you can't fix this in PP. I spent many nights trying to save yellow shots. It takes 20 seconds in LR or DPP. Same with underwater shots without a strobe - lot of blue. Sometimes if there is enough non blue, it can be saved with simple levels changes, but often it's no joy. If your camera allows manual WB settings, you could avoid some of this, but I can't be troubled to constantly update this when I already have a solution that doesn't slow me down.

Highlight recovery is another spot where the 8bit jpeg is clearly inferior. And if your answer is to shorten the exposure, then you introduce other problems, particularly on Canon sensors where shadows tend to carry more noise. I want the primary subject exposed correctly, and then grab back the highlights in the clouds so it's not just a big white blowout.

As for noise reduction - speciality cpus can do better these days, but at the heart of it, it's still a low powered processor that needs to be fast. It's not going to beat a 3 ghz processor that has the luxury of time and multiple methods. The tradeoff usually means loss of detail.

The best thing that can be said for the in camera processing is that Canon can put in all the fixes for that built in lens which is full of compromises. Without this, the RAW image can look drab next to the fixed, saturated, noise reduced JPG image.

Someone earlier spoke of software dependency and the risk of not being able to read it later. Total non issue - keep your Canon DPP disk and you're set for life. (and even if you lose it, you'll be able to find it online) You're at much greater risk of losing your data images than the means to read and process them.